


Seas of Madness

by Bookah



Category: Original Work
Genre: Action/Adventure, Fantasy, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 18:58:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15588531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bookah/pseuds/Bookah
Summary: In a world where magic and technology war for control of the ocean's bottom, one woman dares to salvage the sea floor with neither. Not all is as it seems, however, when she is asked to recover a mere trifle from the depths. Some things were never meant to be recovered.An adventure loosely based on Green Ronin's Freeport setting.





	Seas of Madness

**Author's Note:**

> So this is based more or less on Green Ronin's Freeport game setting. Intended to be usable in pretty much any d20 fantasy game system, it's a place of piracy, dirty politics, lowlifes, ships, dark religion, and horror. It sounds like the perfect retirement location, doesn't it? This story was written to demonstrate some of the diverse possibilities for characters the setting makes possible.
> 
> Like this story? Check out the rest of my original and fanfiction pieces here on Archive of Our Own and leave me a comment! You can do that here, on my [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Silent_Fudanshi), or while supporting me on [Patreon!](https://www.patreon.com/Bookah) Wherever you choose to do so, please do let me know what you think. I crave your comments!

“Yer definitely her.”

Bituin hoisted herself away from the rickety wall she was leaning against and turned around. She made a show of it, keeping it slow and lazy, one hip cocked. Her wooden tankard settled onto an untrustworthy table beside her, and her arms crossed over her belly.

“What you want?” she asked, her clipped accent unusual even for as cosmopolitan a place as the Docks region of Freeport.

The man she’d turned to face gave her a small bow, sweeping a feathered velvet hat from his head. He returned the hat to his head, then adjusted the lapels of his gold and green brocade jacket, giving her a smile before his eyes did a blatant visual once-over.

“Yer definitely her. Skin color like you was made o’ wet clay, wavy black hair, dark eyes. Little bitty thing in a short skirt, bead necklaces, and not a stitch more. Ain’t even the whores dress like that. ‘Bit’, right?”

Bit frowned, her eyes narrowed as he ogled her chest. She snapped her fingers under his eyes. then pointed up to her face. “In my home this is not strange. Looking hard, that is strange.” She jerked her fingers up to point at her face. “You look up here now.”

Beside her, two figures slipped away from the wall to stand behind her. One was another human woman, a little taller than Bit herself, wrapped similarly in a skirt but with a wrap hiding her ivory colored chest and a crown of brown messily swept back over her shoulders. The other, a half elf, stood at the same height as Bit, fiery red hair braided behind him, a pair of pantaloons held up by a sash as his sole garment. He casually began paring his fingernails with a small knife while watching the man.

The overdressed man lifted his head, his eyes coming up beneath red eyebrows to lock with hers. He lifted his hand slowly, palm outward, and slipped back a half step. “No offense meant.”

“I ask again,” Bit said, ignoring her two flankers. “What you want?”

“A diver.” He slowly lowered his hands again. “Name’s Futtock Phil. I need something brought up from th’ bottom.”

Bit looked him up and down, then snorted. She picked her mug up from the table, and took a sip. “Ask someone else. I not interested.”

“Can’t hire a druid or wizard. They’d be for th’ locker if’n they tried it. And I’m not hiring th’ Lobstermen.” The seeming ship’s captain glanced around the Broken Mug, then leaned in closer, though his eyes remained on hers and not on things lower. “Th’ Society and I don’t get along, y’see.”

Bit twisted back around part way, eyeing Phil. “No druid or wizard? That mean no magic.” She tapped her chin, then gave a wry smile. “You want salvage from place Lobstermen already find. They put up magic stopping things, use machines and suits instead of magic.” She laughed a bit. “Very expensive, I go there, salvage from their sunk ruin.”

“They said you was smart. No, not a ruin,” Phil grinned back. “A wreck. I want a small trifle off one of their own ships.”

Bit’s eyes twinkled suddenly. “Lobsterman ship, say?” Her smile became a grin. “Many Lobsterman die because sea not like them. This good. Bit not like them either. You not want ugly suits or ugly machines?” 

“No,” Phil replied. “Nothing of the sort.”

She relaxed, her arms coming down to her hips. “Okay. We talk then. Dakarta! Rum!” She downed what was left in her mug, then sat at the table by her side.

“Sit. What is trifle?”

 

They’d never bothered naming their boat. Forty feet long and fifteen wide, the lateen rigged vessel was little more than an oversized fishing boat. A small cabin at the aft was the only enclosure aboard, barely providing enough room for a pair of berths and enough food stores for a week. The rest of the ship was open to the sky, from keel to gunnel.

Bituin sat atop the small cabin, one arm draped casually over the tiller. She kept her eyes on the stars, maintaining her course, only occasionally glancing at a small glowing orb in her lap. She had wrapped the orb with a thin cloth, cutting down its light to a low glow that would not damage her night vision.

Below she could hear the snores of the rest of her crew. First was the woman who had offered quiet support to her in the Broken Mug, now curled up in Bit’s own bed. Bit found her name just as unpronounceable as the people of Freehold found her own, so she simply called her Witch. The man who had also been at the sailor’s pub bore an even worse bundle of sounds, so he had simply been styled “Stretch”. Sharing a bed with Stretch was a taciturn bald gnome male who Bit had given the descriptive moniker of “Little Man”. This had left Witch in stitches the first time Bit had used it aboard the boat, for reasons Bit had never understood.

As they slept, Bit contemplated what they had been hired to do. It was a task that, frankly, no one else could do. Oh, it wasn’t because she was quite simply the best at what she did. In the islands that had been her childhood home far, far to the west there had been plenty who were better divers than she. But here that made no difference. Quite simply, Bit and her crew were the only ones who dove the sea floor without magic or machine assistance. And when it came to Lobstermen involvement, that meant no one else could possibly do it.

Bit despised the group of salvage specialists calling themselves the Lobstermen. Wrapping themselves in canvas suits and wearing large copper helmets, they used machines to pump air down to the bottom, staying as long as they needed to complete their task before returning to the surface. It was a slap in the face of the sea, turning the bottom into just another bit of land for men to conquer, without any respect for the nature of the place.

At least the druids and wizards that used their spells to breath the ocean for a time were attempting to accommodate nature rather than defy it. Still, nature had no more respect for magical enhancement than it did mechanical. Magic user or Lobsterman, anyone who dove the bottom in defiance of the natural division between creatures of air and creatures of water risked the wrath of the sea. Too long down, too deep, too quick a decent, and they would die, writhing in agony.

Bit had no sympathy for them. Cheat the sea, and pay the price. To the people who used mana and machine to defy that simple adage, that price was known as the bends, and it terrified them. Her own people called it ‘taravana,’ and avoided it by diving one breath at a time.

But still the wizards, druids, and Lobstermen dove. The money from salvage was simply to good. And as men were wont to do, where they made money, they staked claims, and guarded their territory. Since no one else understood the machines the Lobstermen used to breath, that made their only known rivals mages. The Lobstermen protected their claims on the seafloor by simply blocking all magic.

No magic? No rivals.

No rivals,that is, except for an exotic islander from far, far to the east and her hand picked crew. Bit loved defying the Lobstermen and their unnatural methods every chance she had. Robbing one of their own ships was, frankly, a coup she simply couldn’t resist.

The bundled up magical light in her lap suddenly flickered off and on a few times, then died altogether. Bit dropped it into the hold to seize the tiller with both hands, pushing it hard over. The boat heeled over in a tight turn, slapping the spar against the mast a couple of times.

“Lower sail!” she shouted.

The three sailors burst out of the cabin, nearly tripping over one another in their haste. Little Man and Witch began immediately loosening the stays and lowering the sail. Stretch, however, darted all the way forward, his eye on Bit. Once the sail had been sufficiently gathered and stowed, Bit gave him a nod and watched as he sent the anchor down into the moonlit sea.

In moments, the boat’s movement changed into a motionless drift. It bobbed gently on the swell, a sweet rocking motion, and then began to slowly turn in place as the rode attached to the anchor stopped spilling over the side and grew taught before stopping, leaving the boat pointed into the waves.

“Depth?” Bit called out.

“Thirty-seven fathoms to the bottom,” Stretch called back.

Bit nodded, thinking for a moment, then relaxed her grip on the tiller. She tied it down, then hopped off the cockpit. “Stretch. Watch. Wake up with sun.”

“Aye.” Stretch climbed up on top of the cabin to take a casual lean against a railing, gazing outward for potential threats. Bit ducked down into the cabin, collapsing into her berth and tugging Witch into a close cuddle. Rocked by the waves and soothed by the warmth of another, she was asleep in moments.

 

The last of the grog trickled into her belly, washing down Bit’s jerky and biscuit breakfast. She set the now empty tankard down on a convenient barrel and rose, strapping a knife onto her thigh. This done she climbed onto the rail and dove overboard. She entered the water with hardly a splash, a terra-cotta eel that curved upward to once more break the surface, her black hair plastered to her face.

Beside her, a flash of ivory left little more of a splash than hers. Unlike Bit, Witch had not been raised harvesting the ocean floor, but the woman had taken to it like a natural after meeting Bit. Only Bit’s lack of dress had disturbed her, initially, but the first time her pantaloons had snagged on a piece of corral, trapping her until she’d managed to tear free, she’d realized showing a bit of skin was far less of a fear than drowning.

The boys hadn’t complain about this, and often ‘dressed’ similarly despite seldom diving. When Witch had asked Bit why she didn’t insist they dive as well, Bit had snickered and mentioned something about boys not having the fat for it, and quipped about troubling ‘barnacles’. After that, no one suggested anything of the sort again. They simply sailed along, their casual nudity drawing looks of shock from passing ships whenever they chanced upon them in the shipping lanes approaching port.

After bobbing together at the surface for a minute, Bit nodded to Witch, and the pair tipped ass over teakettle to begin swimming down. They didn’t swim long, stopping a mere two fathoms down, gently waving their arms and legs to keep themselves from floating back up while they scanned the water below.

The water clarity was quite good, the bottom easily seen. A mixture of white sand and darker stones formed a surface that anchored various seaweeds and kelps. Silver fish swam in schools amongst the towering columns of green, and more than a few crabs and lobsters skittered about far beneath them.

Bit felt Witch gently tap her shoulder. The brunette pointed low down behind them. Bit twisted, then nodded, a close lipped grin on her face.

The wreck they had come looking for sat upright on the bottom. Several gantrys and derricks sprouted upward amongst the kelp, hoses and ropes waving in the current. Various indescribable pieces of machinery filled the deck, spread amongst the cranes and masts, attached to the hoses, part of  the Lobstermen’s bizarre contraptions that allowed them to breath under the water.

Their anchor had embedded itself in the sand a mere 50 feet away from the wreck. Using the magical light to spot the anti-magic zone around the wreck had proven more successful than Bit had hoped. She had expected to have overshot more, or to even have missed altogether and go weaving back and forth for awhile over the coordinates that Futtock Phil had slipped her. Instead, she’d practically landed right on top of the thing.

She gave a thumbs up, then flipped and swam to the surface. Pulling her hair out of her eyes, she looked back up to where Stretch leaned out over the boat’s rail.

“It there,” she grinned. “Get rope. I tie in.”

“Got it, Bit.”

Stretch disappeared from view, and then a coiled rope flew over the side to splash down beside her. Taking the end of it, she drew in a deep breath, then dove once more, swimming past Witch as the woman hovered just below the surface, watching.

Bit pushed downward, undulating her body like a porpoise, knees and ankles together. As she descended she could feel the water squeezing her, feel a pain start to form in her ears. She made a closed mouth swallow, shifting her jaw, and felt a popping in her ears equalize the pressure, reducing the pain significantly.

About half way down her body began demanding that she exhale and take another breath. Perhaps it was because of the natural pace at which one breathed in air having been thwarted, perhaps the pressure crushing her chest and shrinking her lungs until they felt empty, she didn’t know. Whatever the cause, it was a nagging, unpleasant desire that at this depth would be deadly if she succumbed. She steeled herself against the need with practiced ease, continuing her decent.

Moments later she felt her body neutralize. Rather than fighting to keep from bobbing back to the surface, she felt herself gently falling towards the ocean bottom without any need to further burn air by kicking. She drifted downward, a bubbling, giddy sensation filling her right alongside of the pressure pain in her chest. She had seldom gone this deep, but every time both the pain and the pleasure had happened. She drifted downward in a drunken stupor, euphoria combating the discomfort and winning.

Two minutes after beginning her dive, Bit reached the bottom. Her chest felt as though it was being crushed by a horse, a pain deeper and sharper than she had experienced during any previous dives. She was distracted from the pain, however, by her inner universe. Bit’s head sang with lost thoughts, idle curiosities about the watery world around her, and she had to remind herself exactly why she had come down, lest she forget her goal and succumb to distraction.

Kicking her legs, she drove herself toward the sunken structure that now loomed above her. A hose hung down to the sand on which the ship rested. She grabbed it, hoisting herself upward until she was even with the deck. Bit then swam across the deck toward one of the sturdier looking gantries. A pair of half hitches quickly secured the rope to the ship.

Satisfied, she began surveying the wreck, only to stop herself. She had only been on the bottom two minutes, but she was uncertain how the depth would affect her single lungful of air. The drunken state was urging she stay and take another minute or two to scope out possible entry points into the ship, but she’d learned young that those who changed the plan when on the bottom tended to stay on the bottom permanently. She forced herself to ignore the euphoric, invulnerable state her mind was floating in and turned upward, pulling herself up the rope hand over hand.

As she ascended things began growing a bit dim. Frowning, Bit looked around, and then upward. Seeing Witch floating high above her she realized that there had been no actual change in the lighting. Rather, her vision was going grey, the blue sea and green kelp around her fading into dullness.Glancing at her hands, she realized that even the brown of her own skin looked to be a sickly grey.

She’d made the right choice in beginning her ascent. She still had time, but the visual fading told her that her air was beginning to run out. Had she remained below as the rapidly fading euphoria urged, it might have taken her longer to realize the danger, and she could easily have run out well before she could have reached the surface. She began hoisting herself upward with greater urgency until she felt her body begin rising on its own. Releasing the rope, she allowed herself to be buoyed naturally to the surface

She breached with a whistle, exhaling old air and sucking down fresh. Leaning back she let herself float, face and chest to the sun, soaking in the warmth. The waters of the Serpent's Teeth weren’t frigid, but they weren’t as warm as the islands she’d come from. The rays soaking into her skin were as welcome as the presence of Witch, floating in the water beside her.

After a minute she pulled herself up and aboard, followed by Witch. “Bring in anchor. Rope tied in.”

With a nod and a grunt, Little Man began turning the capstan in the boat’s bow, retrieving the anchor. Grinning, Bit stepped into the cabin for a spot of rum.

 

“Something about this really bothers me,” Witch muttered.

Bit glanced up from her bowl of fisherman’s stew, arching an eyebrow. Stretch was less reserved, however. Swallowing whatever morsel he’d been chewing, he spoke.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, y’ couldna see it from deck,” Witch replied, “but floatin’ there below th’ surface, th’ ship was perfec’ preserved. She sank while under full canvas, but I couldna see a scratch on ‘er. Not a torn sail, not a broken stay. The hull looked perfec’.”

Bit nodded. “Is true. Hatches all dogged open. Boats still there. Ship shape”

Little Man grumbled. “They didn’t take to the boats?”

Witch put down her bowl of soup. “I could see na reason th’ ship sank. No damaged riggin’ from a storm. No cannon holes from pirates. An’ she’s upright. She wasn’ blowed over or turned turtle by wind nor wave. It’s like she jes decided t’ settle to the bottom right there and the crew went along fer th’ ride.”

“Is maybe true,” Bit agreed. She swallowed a bit more of the stew, then gestured with the two sticks she used instead of the spoons the rest of the crew had in hand. “Maybe crew put there.”

Stretch exchanged a look with Little Man, then turned back to Bit. “Like they scuttled ‘er?”

“Open from bottom, let water in. Very gentle.” Bit shrugged.

“But why would they do that?” Witch looked even more troubled.

“Is very good question.” Bit sighed and lay back against the curve of the hull. “Witch, you come down next. Bring knife. You stay outside. I go in hold.” She grinned then. “Maybe I find crew, ask them.”

“Maybe. It’s not like they left in the boats,” Little Man muttered.

 

A net full of stones, with a rope trailing back to the boat had sped the pair down to the wreck quickly with no exertion on their part. Bit had engaged in a furious popping of her ears as she dropped, the pressure change swift thanks to their transportation. As they struck the bottom she glanced over to Witch, receiving a thumbs up confirming all was well.

Bit nodded then swam over to the hull for the second time. Hauling herself aboard she turned and watched as Witch followed. When both were on deck Bit slipped along to one of the main hatches that led below, a gantry still poised above it as though ready to discharge cargo. She patted the gantry, receiving a nod from Witch, and then upended herself and swam down into the darkness below.

What she saw merely confirmed the peacefulness of the sinking. Every crate, barrel, and canvas wrapped object remained in place, perfectly tied down. If a ship were tossed about or suddenly rolled over ropes would have snapped and cargo tumbled. Instead, everything was in perfect order.

Another hatch took her down deeper, opening up into the bilges, the very bottom of the ship. The light that had pourn through the first hatch barely escaped into this second layer of the ship, and Bit had to wait for her eyes to adjust enough to begin sorting out the shadows. Soon, though, she found what she was looking for.

Irregular holes had been opened in the bottom of the hull to either side of the keel, their edges jagged. An axe lay next to one of the holes, and above her wood splinters still floated against the overhead, not yet waterlogged enough to sink.

Bit frowned. She had intended it as a joke, but the crew actually had scuttled their ship. She turned to swim back out, and jerked in surprise, almost losing precious air as her mouth slackened.

A corpse waved at her, the arm moving in a small eddy. She could not tell if it was male or female, human or elf. Sea creatures had already been at it, making enough of a feast of the unexpected bounty for identification to be simply impossible.

Bit stared for a moment, then pulled back. This was not her first corpse, and so it should not have held her even for that moment. But the realization that the crew member floating before her had made no effort to escape after deliberately letting in the sea unnerved her somehow.

She spun and hurriedly began chasing the light, moving to escape the watery tomb. A momentary darkness occluded the patch of brightness above her, causing her to halt. Something thumped against the bulkhead above, and she regained a sense of caution.

She drew the knife strapped to the outside of her thigh by a simple leather thong. Holding it before her, she slowly pulled herself out into the light above with a sense of foreboding.

Witch was braced against the gantry, knife also in hand, poised to attack. Facing her, his back to Bit, a merman floated, wiggling a trident free of where it had struck the deck.

Before either could react, Bit threw herself forward. The diving knife in her hand drove deep into the fishman’s shoulder blade. A cloud of blood exploded outward, obscuring Bit’s vision, and she felt the powerful slap of a tail against her leg as the water before her exploded into chaos.

As she spun in an eddy of current, her hand slapped the shaft of the trident, still wedged in place. She latched onto it, stopping her uncontrolled twisting, and tried to catch her bearings. A shadow drew her eyes upward and she swam sideways, clearing out from behind a cloud of floating blood. The merman hovered there beyond it a moment, more blood streaming out into the sea, glaring at her, and then slammed himself into the door leading into the ship’s quarterdeck. The door smashed open and he hurled himself inside.

Bit forced her brain to work, fighting the deep water drunkenness and a growing urge for air.. Her simple plan of exploring would have kept both her and Witch alive. But the introduction of the merman changed all of that. Attempting to surface with him still alive and mobile would be the surest way to give him the chance to catch them and drag them back down to drown. However, chasing after a far better designed underwater creature would be just as suicidal, He, after all, didn’t need fresh air, and could simply keep the fight going until she drowned.

She shook her head realizing she really had no choice. Going up now was certain death. But if she killed the merman, she at least had a chance, albeit a small one, to bolt for the surface after.

Bit turned in the water and quickly gestured Witch upward. The woman stared a moment, then shook her head. With a jerk of her hand, Bit insisted, and she watched as Witch reluctantly began pulling herself over to the rope that served as their lifeline to the surface.

_ At least _ , Bit thought,  _ Witch can escape while I’m drowning _ .

Stealing her resolve, Bit turned and swam into the darkness of the Quarterdeck, following the thinning blood trail before her.

A shifting shadow in the captain’s cabin warned her just in time. Bit quickly rolled aside, avoiding a powerful flipper as it attempted to slam into her. She sank to the deck, then darted for a small space beneath the skipper’s oak desk. There was no escape from there, but the merman’s tail could not strike her. If he wanted her, he’d have to try coming in with her, and her knife.

The merman’s clearly realized this. In the open he clearly had the advantage, even unarmed. But in such tight confines it was she who would make short work over her deadly foe. She watched as he turned his head about, seeking some weapon he could use to counter her blade.

They both spotted the small statuette on the deck at the same time. She could make out few details, only that the vaguely human shape held aloft a sword. She thought it gold, but couldn’t tell with her greying vision. It would be a makeshift weapon, at best, but in the water his native skill would balance out the awkwardness, leaving them more or less evenly matched. And he would have the initiative.

Cursing internally, Bit watched as he darted for it. Her eyes watched his hand reach down to grab the statuette. Webbed fingers curled around it, lifting it, pointed the blade towards her.

Fish-like eyes seemed to suddenly bug out of his head as his body spasmed. From his freshly gaping, stricken mouth he unleashed a terrifying sound, a rattling, cracking, alien shriek worse than any whale song she’d heard, causing Bit to cover her ears against the pain of it. With a lurch he dropped the thing he was holding back to the deck, then slammed himself about inside the cabin, battering himself against the bulkheads until he was bleeding from dozens of cuts and contusions, before finally darting back out the hatch and into the open waters beyond, still issuing his horrifying wail of pain.

Carefully, Bit pulled herself out of the little niche that had been her safehold. She swam closer to the object, careful not to touch it. Merely looking at it from this close filled her with revulsion, made her want to vomit into the ocean, a move as deadly as exhaling would be.

She understood. Horribly, terribly, she suddenly knew why the crew had scuttled their own ship, and gone down with it. Ancient things lurked on the seafloor, things that went beyond mere evil into realms of madness. The Lobstermen had stumbled across just such a thing. They’d retrieved it, and suffered the consequence.

And she had been suckered into finding it as well.

Shuddering in fear, she tore the sheets from the bed, feeling her skull throb as her vision began narrowing down. Even through the euphoria of the depths, tempered by the horror creeping over her, she could tell that she had been down far too long already, that she was running out of air, and was in just as much danger as before the merman’s misfortune in discovering the idol.

She fought down a sense of panic, forcing herself to focus on the task at hand. Wrapping the blankets about her arm, she reached down for the statue, plucking it from the deck, then wrapped the blankets into a bundle around it, her skin never touching the vile thing.

A desperate kicking of feet flung her out of the cabin and down the passage, bringing her back into the full light of day. She almost screamed when a shadow crossed her, certain the maddened merman had returned to finish her off now that she was back in the open. The scream died in her throat, however, as Bit looked up.

The fight went out of her the moment she took in the sight of the massive tiger shark circling above her. She had, it seemed, escaped the merman, only to have her hope destroyed anew by the fickle nature of the sea. She froze as the shark turned, angled toward her, and suddenly shot forward.

A terrible scream sounded behind her, and she felt herself knocked aside by the shark’s fin. In the swirling water, temporarily confused as to which way was up, she caught brief glimpses of the shark thrashing, attempting to tear the merman it had caught into bite sized chunks amidst a cloud of deepening red.

Terrified, Bit dropped over the side of the wreck, and ducked towards the rock filled net. She wedged the cloth wrapped bundle beneath a stone, then began kicking upwards, her arms hauling her up the rope towards the air so far above in a churning, panicked climb.

The pressure slowly released her, but she could scarcely notice it. Rather, her attention was kept by the increasing numbness of her fingers and hands and the ever shrinking circle of light in her upturned vision. She could feel her heart, usually slow when diving, beginning to race. She kept pulling, kept fighting to get upward, to get to air, to escape that ship of damned souls, maddenned sea folk, and hungry sharks…

Suddenly the circle of light that was all of her vision remaining was occulted, and she screamed in the darkness. Air burst forth from her, and with it her last chance. She felt her body seized, felt flesh pressing to hers. She felt something sharp and fierce cut her lip, a sudden pressure in her chest. And then came blackness and unknowing.

 

Futtock Phil fixed Bit with his eyes as though he was attempting to crack her open and find a pearl inside. “Yer tellin’ me ya lost it.”

“Yes. Lost in ocean.”

“Where?”

“Don’t know.”

“What d’ya mean, y’ don’t know?”

Bit shrugged, then took a pull of ale that was far more delicious than it should have been. Casually she leaned against the wall of the Broken Mug, and turned her eyes towards the alabaster woman seated nearby.

“Witch pulled me out. Dove in, met halfway, gave me air. When I wake up, I tell them to bring net up, with rocks and statue. They do, but never unload. They in hurry to leave, make me safe. So we sail away then. Before Lobsters come find ship. Find us.” She shook her head, and turned to lock eyes with Phil. “Statue fall out of net during night.” She shrugged again. “Is good thing. Statue was bad.”

“Are y’ sure?” Phil leaned in closer, his eyes not even beginning to roam her body the way it had when last they had met. They remained locked intently on her face. “Absolutely sure.”

“Yes. Made Lobstermen crazy. They sink own ship, don’t try escape. Crazy.”

Phil grunted “An yer positive no one’ll ever be able t’ find an’ recover it.”

“Where to look? We sail all night, don’t know when statue fell. It never be found.”

She kept her face locked in a mask, even though inside she was grinning. She couldn’t be more certain that there was no way the statue would be recovered. After all, it had “accidently” gone overboard above a deep sea trench well over a league deep. It had taken almost a full day of sailing the wrong direction to reach the spot, but a knife had been all that was necessary to “lose” the net and its contents there. There wasn’t a magic in the world that could ever reach it where it now lay.

Phil stared a moment longer, then leaned back, letting a grin form on his face. “Good.”

Bit blinked. “What? Good? But you wanted...”

“I sure did. I hired ya t’ get it so no one else would. I was gonna toss it in th’ blackest hellpit I could find if you actually managed t’ bring it to me.”

Bit cocked her head, surprised.

“Hey,” Phil drawled. “Let us be honest here, Bit. Freehold may be a shithole, but it’s my shithole. I ain’t gonna let any damn evil statue make th’ place worse.” He turned and began walking away. His hand suddenly popped upward and he threw a small but heavy bag over his shoulder for Bit to catch with a happy, dull clink of noble metals. “Until next time, Bit.”

Bit shook her head, then picked up her ale to sit down next to Witch with an idle caress of the woman’s brown hair, earning an affectionate smile. She took a long pull from the mug, then wiped her lips on the back of her wrist.

“Do you really think there will be a next time, Captain?” she muttered, her Freehold accent perfect. “Don’t bet on it.”


End file.
